Dawson Metzger-Fleetwood

Web | iOS and visionOS | ML and RL



About Me

I’m Dawson Metzger-Fleetwood, a software engineer with dual degrees in Finance and Computer Science (Machine Learning specialization) from the University of Maryland.

I've been a professional developer since 2019. Most of my work revolves around web, iOS, and visionOS development, but my professional experience also includes building ML pipelines, automating business processes, contributing to open source, and developing agentic workflows, MCP servers, and CLI tools. I also co-founded Visual Language Associates, a startup in the cued language and interpretation space. I love building cool things both at work and in my free time, and I’m passionate about solving real world problems with technology.

When I’m not coding, I’m dedicated to fitness and continuously pushing myself as a natural bodybuilder. I also love learning - whether it be a random skill, a new language, or an RL algorithm optimization. Traveling is another big part of my life. I enjoy exploring new places, immersing myself in different cultures, and collecting experiences that shape who I am.

I’m currently a Software Engineer at About Objects, but am always open to interesting projects. If you’d like to connect, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Skills

Web

I have professional experience engineering full-stack web applications and interactive websites. I've built modern backends with Node and Bun, as well as specialized sites with PHP and custom WordPress plugins. I've led full-scale, from-scratch overhauls of enterprise websites, built production grade frontends with React as well as vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, managed business critical production deployments, and built integrated web experiences featuring real-time data processing with WebSockets and libraries like Three.js. On the systems side, I've architected CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and Docker, deployed secure multi-tenant serverless applications on AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, Cognito), engineered backend platform systems including an OAuth 2.0/OIDC authorization server with PKCE and token introspection, integrated usage-based billing and payment systems, and hardened production infrastructure to safely run untrusted workloads with process isolation and network egress controls.

iOS and visionOS

I’ve worked extensively on iOS and visionOS projects, including advanced AR/VR development using RealityKit. I have experience with RealityKit’s entity-component-system architecture, coordinating SharePlay in 3D spaces, designing and debugging complex and highly customized view hierarchies in UIKit and SwiftUI, package management in Xcode, concurrency in Swift 6, and building ultra high performance, heapless programs. I’m comfortable across Apple's full development stack, from optimizing performance with Instruments, managing scenes in Reality Composer Pro, deploying CI/CD pipelines with Xcode Cloud and TestFlight, and training/using ML models with Create and Core ML.

ML and RL

Professionally, I've applied machine learning to both enterprise and government systems. I designed and built a real time computer vision pipeline that trains models capable of recognizing and tracking the orientation of 3D objects using LIDAR. I’ve also fine-tuned and deployed foundation models on H100 clusters to improve performance on proprietary domain-specific tasks. I've also built multimodal agentic pipelines that generate structured metadata, using LLM juries for consensus scoring and evaluation driven loops that iteratively optimize prompts.

Personally, my interest in ML extends much further. I built a transformer using only numpy, and have worked directly with embeddings, autoencoders, and more. I've had some exposure to deep reinforcement learning and loved it. I've read Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Sutton and Barto cover to cover and implemented some of the core algorithms: TD(λ), DQN and SARSA varieties, some policy gradients, off policy importance sampling, etc.

02.Where I've Worked

Software Engineer @ About Objects

July 2023 – Present
  • Worked extensively on a multi-platform (iPad, iPhone, and Vision Pro) event management platform for government clients, featuring real-time resource tracking and 3D visualizations with RealityKit. Featured in Apple’s enterprise showcase.
  • Scaled the platform from inception to being able to handle 10,000+ concurrent users, architected real time data sharing for collaboration across distributed command teams, and optimized rendering hierarchical data with a tree-based architecture that reduced latency by 80%.
  • Scaled a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions and automated TestFlight builds as the team quadrupled in size. Mentoring interns and junior engineers.
  • Worked on several internal projects, including leading the overhaul of the company website with custom WordPress plugins and a PHP backend, building an MCP server to help PMs with Jira project administration, and building pipelines to automate billing processes.
  • Led development of a 3D ML object recognition pipeline, enabling rotation inference from 200 images. Supported an industrial oil drill manufacturer in analyzing drill bit component history and repairs.
  • Led About Object’s AI blog, writing articles on autoencoders, reinforcement learning, GNNs, and transformers.

03.Selected Works

04.Blog

There is a fly on my laptop and it runs away

August 2026

How inverting a kernel from gather to scatter and porting from WebGPU to Metal cut per step work by 560x and lets me run a complete insect brain on my laptop.

The Art Nobody Looks At

July 2026

A gallery of works of art currently sitting in storage at some of the world's most popular art museums.

Arena.ai Leaderboard Update Badges

May 2026

How a Tampermonkey script, regexing RSC payload streams, and React hydration injection make the case for an open web.

Helm: A Workspace Switcher for VS Code and Cursor

March 2026

Building a Cursor/VSCode extension that brings Arc Browser style space and workspace management to your IDE sidebar.

Toolbelt: Giving AI Clients a Way Into Your Environment

March 2026

Turn your local machine into a remote MCP server so any AI client can access your skills setup and take actions on your machine.

Building a Coding Agent in Embedded Swift

February 2026

Building a fully featured coding agent in Embedded Swift that compiles to a 195 KB binary and boots in 120ms.

How Fast Are Agents Improving?

February 2026

An analysis of METR-Horizon benchmark data showing AI agent capability doubling times, with interactive projections through 2033.

Autoencoders – Part 2

April 2024

Using autoencoders in practice: outlier detection, variational autoencoders for data generation, denoising, and the CLIP model.

Autoencoders – Part 1

January 2024

Building intuition for autoencoders: how they compress data into lower-dimensional representations and what makes them useful.

Highlights from My CS Degree

May 2022

A collection of projects from my Computer Science undergrad, consolidated from an older version of this site.

05.Contact

My inbox is always open. If you're interested in working together, have a question, or just want to say hi, feel free to reach out! Send me an email at dawsonamf@icloud.com, or connect with me by selecting an option below. You can also schedule a call.

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